Response to President Nikolic: Defence of democratic and European Serbia, not vandalism

— 25.08.2016.

In respect to a Youweeks-long debate about the morality of Slobodan Milosevic’s politics, an idea to honor him by building a monument to him in Serbia as well as President Nikolic’s statement that “this monument wouldn’t survive long because it would be vandalized by self-proclaimed democrats’ YIHR issues the following declaration:

We, the representatives of the lost generation, born during the nineties – the worst decade of the modern Serbian history, promise that a monument to Slobodan Milosevic will not survive a single day in our city.

Born and raised during the time of wars, complete isolation and great poverty, cut off from the rest of the world, we speak for:

Youth sent to enemy lines during their military service;

Youth who was suffocating in tear gas and had their heads and spines broken by police batons;

Youth who spent their early childhood in basements and queuing in front of supermarkets;

Youth who left their country in the nineties, never to come back again,

Youth who is still escaping Serbia because of consequences of the nineties,

Youth separated from friends owing to Milosevic’s politics,

Our peers from the region who spent the nineties under the siege;

The victims of Milosevic’s bloody squadrons who sow death from Croatia to Kosovo;

All the victims of bombing who are still unaccounted for

Forcibly conscripted refugees who were returned to war inferno from which they had escaped;

Our peers who were ousted, who fleed to Serbia on tractors only to be banned from entering the capital, instead of being given a shelter.

All victims of the Great Serbia;

All journalists and political opponents of the regime who were banished and murdered;

The generation of our parents, teachers and professors who managed to preserve dignity and teach us the values of freedom, peace, truth and justice, despite the dictatorship of hatred, lies, deception, violence, cheating and stealing;

In the name of the generation of our grandparents who had their lifesavings taken away in order to finance the war machinery and electoral fraud;

All of those who had their lives directly on indirectly destroyed because of Milosevic’s politics, regime, poltroons and followers.

Our duty to the generation born in the 2000’s is to make sure that they are the first generation to live their lives in piece.

That is why we will not allow building a monument to the last war lord in our region. If it comes to that it is our duty to take it down. That is not vandalism but defence of the democratic and European Serbia.

On occasion of Vladimir Putin’s visit to Serbia on January 17 2019, as civil society organizations and citizens, we have signed this letter in protest of the glorification of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule, a trend that is prominent in Serbia.

Today begins the second fundraising cycle for our campaign War criminals should be silent, with which we collect funds to pay off a fine in the sum of 450.000 Serbian dinars; the fine eight YIHR activists were sentenced to for disturbing the peace by protesting against convicted war criminal Veselin Šljivančanin.